What’s truly unexpected about this movie is that it seems to switch genres somewhere in the middle. It felt like it was going to be about one man’s foreign and frustrating experience working in Saudi Arabia. His career hit a rough spot; he went overseas to try to redeem himself; things didn’t go as smoothly as he’d hoped; he tried to finesse them; he seemed to be moving forward.

But then, the whole career aspect of the movie just gets sidelined because of a romance with a local woman. In the end, middle-aged businessman doesn’t make the sale, but by that point, it doesn’t matter.

By all accounts, the book treats his problems with more depth than the script, though possibly not with more soul than Hanks himself.